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The Cephalopod Coffee House is a monthly meetup hosted by The Armchair Squid. We meet on the last Friday of the month to write about the best book we've read in the past month. Click here for a full list of participants.

This month I'm reviewing Redshirts by John Scalzi, a choice which is particularly poignant considering the news of Leonard Nimoy's death earlier today. Redshirts owes its existence to Star Trek and it's many spin offs and imitators. Although the minor character of Commander Q'eeng is obviously the Spock proxy in the novel, he is nothing like the Vulcan that Nimoy brought to life. I'm not the first to say this, but I'll say it again: Leonard Nimoy as Spock was the heart and soul of Star Trek, and without him it would never have become the phenomenon that it did.

So, before I get sad again, I'm going to move on to the review:

The newest crew members to the Intrepid, the flag
ship of the Universal Union’s space fleet, quickly learn that their
vessel has a shockingly high death rate amongst the junior officers.
Even more perplexing is the ridiculous and nonsensical
ways in which people die. They begin to notice that veteran crew
members steer clear of the senior officers, going as far as to hide in
store rooms when the senior officers come around looking for away team
members. After several increasingly bizarre and deadly
away missions the new ensigns begin to look for answers, and what they
find has the potential to literally destroy their world.

Anyone with even the slightest connection to pop
culture knows that a “red shirt” is an expendable character – barely a
character really, they usually don’t even get names – on a TV show or in
a movie, who dies in order to create drama
and up the stakes without endangering the lives of the main cast.
Scalzi takes the trope and asks “Who are these people, and do they
deserve better?”

Redshirts is presented in three codas: The
first follows the adventures of the Intrepid and its red shirts, and the
following two are concerned with the fallout from their plot. The
change in tone between the codas (especially the
final one) is a bit jarring, but it serves its purpose. While the
premise may seem silly at first as it gleefully wallows in the tropes
and lazy writing of bad science fiction, it quickly turns towards
exploring the ideas of identity and free will.

This book may not
be for everyone. Some people may find it too silly, or take offense to
its critiques of certain television shows, but if you’re looking for
something a little meta, that reads fairly quickly,
and brings a smile to your face every once in a while, give Redshirts a try.